Lisa Lowe: The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, 1800s, abolitionism, asia, black people, capitalism, colonialism, dialectic, governance, history, imperialism, indigenous peoples, intimacy, knowledge, labour, liberalism, marxism, narrative, race, slavery, trade, united states, violence
“In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, June 2015
ISBN 9780822358633, 0822358638
319 pages
Discussion: Gayatri Gopinath, Alyosha Goldstein, Moon-Ho Jung, Stephanie Smallwood (book roundtable at ASA Conference, Toronto, 2015, video).
Reviews: John Holmwood (Theory, Culture & Society, 2016), Betty Joseph (American Historical Review, 2016), Hossein Ayazi (Qui Parle, 2016), Michael Gaffney (Journal of American Studies, 2016), Adam Nemmers (Women’s Studies, 2016), Marion C. Rohrleitner (Pacific Historical Review, 2016), Lance Bertelsen (Modern Philology, 2017), Harrod J Suarez (Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 2017), Jesse van Amelsvoort (Nexus Instituut, n.d.), Hadley Howes (Antipode, 2020).
May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, Dagmar Schultz (eds.): Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · black people, colonialism, feminism, germany, history, race, racism, sexism, women
“ISD (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland), ADEFRA (Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland), Neuen Schwarzen Bewegung, all began in the 1980s in Berlin, centred around Freie Universität where Dagmar Schultz was professor. She invited Audre Lorde as a visiting professor from 1984, where May Opitz (from 1992 May Ayim) and Katharina Oguntoye attended her seminars. Out of this came Black History Month in Germany in 1991, and Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, published in 1986.” (Source)
First published in German as Farbe bekennen: afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, Orlanda Frauenverlag, Berlin, 1986.
English edition
Foreword by Audre Lorde
Translated by Anne V. Adams
Publisher University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1991
ISBN 0870237594, 9780870237591
xxv+239 pages
Reviews: Amina Mama (Feminist Review, 1993), Leslie Morris (German Quarterly, 1994), George Junne (Explorations in Sights and Sounds, 1993), Laura Freisberg (BR, 2020, DE).
Publisher (new ed., 2020, DE)
Publisher (EN)
Wikipedia
WorldCat
Cedric J. Robinson: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983–)
Filed under book | Tags: · black people, capitalism, communism, marxism, race, slavery, socialism
“In this ambitious work, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand black people’s history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of black people and black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of blacks on western continents, Robinson argues, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.
To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright.”
Foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley
Publisher Zed Press, London, 1983
487 pages
Second edition
New Preface by the author
Publisher University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2000
ISBN 0807848298, 9780807848296
xxxiii+436 pages
Third edition, Revised and updated
New Preface by Damien Sojoyner and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard
Publisher University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2021
ISBN 1469663724, 9781469663722
liii+436 pages
Commentary: Robin D. G. Kelley (Boston Review, 2017), .
Reviews: Cornel West (Monthly Review, 1988), Black Perspectives roundtable (2016): Paul Hébert, Joshua Guild, Jennifer L. Morgan, Carole Boyce Davies, Austin McCoy, Robyn C. Spencer; Bedour Alagraa (CLR James Journal, 2018), Austin Smidt (PPE Sydney, 2020), Minkah Makalani (Boston Review, 2021).
PDF (2nd ed., 2000, 14 MB)
PDF (3rd ed., 2020, 4 MB)
See also Robinson’s An Anthropology of Marxism (2001).
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